MKE's view on pens

Once upon a time, I was young and was studying for my thesis in Paris (at the end of the 1980s). Every Saturday morning, I went by Metro to a cafe at the Boulevard St.Michel. I don't remember the name but it looks like it is called "Le Lutece" now. I bought a German newspaper, had my coffee and wrote some to do memos for the next week. Now, 35 years later, Paris is too far away and such kind of cafes do not exist in Narita (Japan). So, I am going by bicycle to a shopping mall. I am also buying groceries here and there. I am using a back-pack and shopping consists of regular  removing all the contents of my back-pack and repacking them. I am always afraid that I would loose my pens when doing this, so I have a special pen set for this "coffee-drinking-shopping". This is it. A leather daily diary and a leather pen box and some famous pens. I gotcha.  Everything in this picture is not what it looks like.  While the pen box is described as "leather" on Ali...

日本輸入筆記具協会 / Japan Imported Pen Association Established in 1978, the  non-profit organization " Japan Imported Pen Association" is an importer and distributor of fountain pens, ballpoint pens, mechanical pencils, roller-balls, and other writing instruments made in foreign countries. Apparently, they distributed a catalog to their members since the start of the association but I haven't seen any pictures of such a catalogue from before 1990. If you search, please be aware that until 1992, the name of the catalogue was "The Pen". From 1993, it was renamed into "The Pen Catalogue". Many famous pen brands were members, even Montblanc was there until the mid 1990s. I have a complete set from 1998 until 2019. Older issues became increasingly expensive to acquire, so I stopped collecting them after I stopped collecting pens. This set is for sale now. ( このセットは現在販売予定である。)  Contact You can see the newest catalogue (at the time of writing the catalogue from 2024) ...